Very few written sources for ancient art history or theory have survived into the modern age. For literary theory there are Aristotle and Horace in particular, for rhetoric an abundance of treatises in both Greek and Latin, besides the countless other texts, from the great debate between Aeschylus and Euripides staged in Aristophanes’ Frogs to Plato, Lucian, Plutarch, and so on, in which various genres of literature are discussed in polemical, philosophical, satirical, or essayistic modes.
There is nothing like this for painting or sculpture, although Vitruvius’ De architectura survived as a reference for architecture. Renaissance and early modern theorists, from Alberti onwards, borrowed paradigms from rhetoric (notably the tripartite division of inventio, dispositio and elocutio), and parallels between painting and poetry from Horace and Plutarch, quoting Simonides. But for the history of ancient art and tales of the great artists, their richest source was Pliny, and when Vasari came to write his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori (1550), we find these anecdotes not only recalled but even echoed in the lives of modern artists.
In looking at Pliny’s text from this modern perspective, however, we can overlook what it was that interested the author himself, and his contemporary Roman readers, about these stories of the lives of painters and sculptors, the great majority of which were drawn, not only from Greece, but from periods that were already as remote in time from the first century AD as the Renaissance and Early Modern ages are from us today.
Valérie Naas’ concern, in this study, is to establish a comprehensive list of all of Pliny’s anecdotes about artists, rather than just concentrate on those that were most influential in the modern period, to identify his various sources and the intermediaries by which he came to know of them, and finally, perhaps above all, as the book’s subtitle suggests, to understand how Pliny effectively integrated and appropriated these stories within a Roman and even contemporary Roman discourse on art.
After an introduction in which she rightly reminds us that the historical and biographical accuracy of the famous anecdotes is less important than what they tell us about conceptions of art and the role and social status of the artist, the book is divided into four main parts. In the first, ‘Pline l’Ancien et l’art: le choix de l’anecdote’, Naas begins with an introduction to Pliny as a source for art history and considers the place of art within the vast sweep of the Naturalis historia.
She discusses the modern discovery and conceptualisation of the ‘artist anecdote’, first in Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur (1924) and then in Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s Die Legende vom Künstler (1934). She considers the relation of these anecdotes to the broader question of biography, but also discusses their place in the art of rhetoric, where an anecdote can be employed as an exemplum. This section concludes with one of the most famous of all Plinian stories (NH 35.29): Zeuxis, commissioned to paint a picture of Helen of Troy for the citizens of Akragas (Croton in Cicero’s earlier and more detailed version), declares that no single girl can serve as the model for the most beautiful woman who has ever lived; asking the city to bring him their most beautiful girls, he chooses the five most exceptional and combines their best features to compose his ideal.
In the second main section, ‘L’Appropriation plinienne des anecdotes’, Naas begins with the question of Pliny’s sources and quotes the many studies that have been published on this subject. Again, the question is complicated by the fact that the original sources have been lost or survive only in fragments or paraphrases, but among those cited by Pliny himself one of the most important was Xenocrates (pp. 44–49), a 3rd century Hellenistic practitioner and writer from Sicyon influenced by Lysippus as well as Aristotle and Democritus, from whom he borrowed a schema of art history based on a cycle of growth, perfection and decline.
The other important sources, especially for the anecdotes about specific artists, were Antigonus of Carystus (3rd c. BC) and Duris of Samos (4th–3rd c. BC), who was at one time tyrant of the island as well as the author of lost treatises on painting and sculpture (pp. 49–50, 115–25). The precise relations between these various authorities and the technical observations and stylistic judgements attributed to them remain matters of scholarly debate, but in any case, Pliny derived his knowledge of such sources from Latin intermediaries, perhaps Varro (p.29) rather than from the original Greek texts.
Naas then deals with the corpus of Plinian anecdotes, beginning with a survey of the books in which artistic matters are discussed and an outline of the principal anecdotes mentioned in each case (pp. 129–38). In the following chapter, after reproducing Kris and Kurz’s thematic ordering of the main stories (pp. 139–43), she presents her own more detailed catalogue raisonné (pp. 143–52). It is immediately apparent from this longer list, and Naas makes the point explicitly, that she is as much concerned with the many less familiar stories that anchor Pliny’s text in the Roman context, as with the more celebrated tales of the great figures of earlier Greek painting (pp. 152–53).
Accordingly, after a lengthy discussion of Pliny’s writing of the anecdotes (pp.155–87), the fourth section of the book, ‘Une romanisation des problématiques sur l’art’ starts by reflecting on the status of art and artists, first in the Greek and then in the Roman worlds (pp.191–227). This question turns out to be as complex as it is in the early modern period, raising the same question summed up in one of the section’s sub-headings: ‘l’image flatteuse de l’artiste: preuve ou revendication de dignité?’
Many of Pliny’s most famous anecdotes, indeed, concern either the astonishing talent of artists and their consequent fame, or the regard and even friendship with which they were treated by the great (most notably in several stories about Apelles and Alexander), or their wealth and the extraordinary prices paid for their works. But were these stories repeated precisely in order to assert the dignity of the fine arts against the ancient prejudice against ‘banausic’ trades? Most of the authorities that Naas cites seem to agree that ancient artists in the Greek and Hellenistic world, like those of the Renaissance, did succeed in establishing a distinction between fine art and artisanal craft, even if their arts were not generally listed among the artes liberales. Pliny notes that art became part of the education system in Greece, reserved for the free-born and prohibited for slaves (NH 35.32).
But this still leaves the more complex question of Roman perceptions of art, which is inseparable from Roman attitudes in general towards the Greek civilisation that they had conquered and assimilated but still regarded with some suspicion. Moreover, all the great artists celebrated by Pliny lived, as we already mentioned, centuries earlier and in various parts of the Greek world. Interestingly, he does also look back to an earlier period in Rome’s own history when painting seemed acceptable as the pursuit of a patrician like Gaius Fabius Pictor (late 4th c. BC), and yet once again that was long ago, and Pliny implies that art in his own time has been debased as an increasingly mechanical industry producing luxury items for the rich. The condemnation of luxury is one of the author’s recurrent themes, and the probable employment of servile labour in the art workshops of his time would have tainted the contemporary art industry even more profoundly.
These more recent questions aside, Pliny’s account reflects the way that the Romans systematically adopted Greek art and to some extent made it their own (one could probably see a parallel in the British and German adoption of Italian Renaissance art in the 19th century and their constitution of it as a central subject of art history). In Naas’ expanded corpus of Plinian anecdotes, beyond the famous stories about the most celebrated Greek masters, a great many tell of the acquisition of Greek art and its importation and installation at Rome, whether through conquest or later purchase. One section, aptly subtitled ‘du pillage à la passion’ shows how conquerors bringing home the spoils of war gradually gave way to connoisseurs, aesthetes and collectors.
The fourth and final section of Naas’ book, ‘L’Elaboration d’une pensée plinienne sur l’art’, attempts a synthesis of Pliny’s attitudes towards and ideas about art. It is not surprising, considering the framework of an encyclopaedic work on nature and the human arts and crafts that make use of natural resources, that one of his primary interests is in technical aspects of art. Whether Pliny has a coherent theory of art is less certain; indeed, Naas herself concludes, on the second-to-last page of the book, that his work does not amount to ‘une théorie de l’art’ (p. 357). Pliny, however, constantly alludes to fragments of theory embodied in the anecdotes he relates, but he himself insists, as Naas reminds us several times, that he is only treating the subject of art in haste (p. 325), although such assertions are no doubt also to be taken as a kind of pre-emptive defence against criticism.
The most obvious artistic value that Pliny seems to assert is that of verisimilitude or naturalism, illustrated in accounts of images so ‘real’ that they deceive birds and animals. Interestingly though, these stories are particularly associated with the generation of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, while Pliny’s most important historical and critical sources reflect the late Classical and early Hellenistic culture of a century after their time, epitomised by Lysippus and Apelles. In art as in literature, this culture values refinement and subtlety (illustrated by the contest of lines between Apelles and Protogenes, even if Apelles is also said to have painted a horse at which real horses whinnied), beauty and especially grace rather than just accuracy, and the virtue of knowing when to stop rather than dogged ‘diligence’. It also recognises that appearance (including effects of perspective and foreshortening) must be taken into account to achieve a look of verisimilitude, and knows from Aristotle that mimesis has very different modes (Poetics 1448), and that the plausible fictions of poetry are more philosophical than the literal truth of history (ibid., 1451 a–b).
Questions of naturalism and different approaches to the imitation of nature, of diligence and grace, were also prominent themes in early modern art theory, and it would have been interesting to include some instances of the afterlife of Pliny’s stories. Thus Apelles’ portrait of the one-eyed Antigonus is reincarnated in Piero della Francesca’s Federico da Montefeltro (1473-75, Uffizi); the story of Protogenes eating boiled lupins while painting the Ialysus probably inspired Vasari’s account of Michelangelo’s frugal diet; Lysippus pointing to the crowd as his teachers is echoed in Bellori’s Life of Caravaggio.
This is not, of course, Naas’ main focus, nor is her book aimed at a general readership. It is highly specialised and perhaps inevitably weighed down by the multitude of citations and academic references throughout. A more serious criticism is that many topics and anecdotes are discussed repeatedly in different contexts and different parts of the book. But if diligence sometimes prevails over grace in the composition of this work, one must applaud the thoroughness of the author’s scholarship and the value of her demonstration that Pliny is not merely the conduit for fragments of ancient art history, but an author determined to position the history of painting and sculpture both within his encyclopaedic account of the natural world and specifically within the history and culture of Imperial Rome.